How do Filipinos in the diaspora enact and envision return? How might we reconceive remittances—the money sent home by migrant workers—not only as an object of financial exchange but as a horizon of collective action? In this lecture, Paul Nadal reads recent OFW narratives alongside transnational grassroots labor activism in order to define what he calls the “social form of remittances.” He argues that when we view the global flows of money from the dual perspective of financial speculation and social necessity, migrant remittances can shed new light on the intimacy between human labor and numerical abstraction that social scientific work on human labor export merely take as a given rather than an object of critique.

About the resource person

Paul Nadal is an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, where he teaches courses on 20th and 21st century global Anglophone and Asian American literature. His book manuscript, Remittance Fiction: Human Labor Export, Realism, and the Filipino Novel in English, threads together histories of Philippine–U.S. literary and economic relations in order to examine the long twentieth-century transformation of the Philippines into one of the world’s largest labor-exporting economies. He received his PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a dissertation fellow at the Institute of International Studies under the direction of Colleen Lye and Judith Butler.

About Kritika Kultura

Kritika Kultura is the international refereed journal of language, literary, and cultural studies of the Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University. It is acknowledged by a host of Asian and Asian American Studies libraries and scholarly networks, and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Clarivate), Scopus, EBSCO, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP).